It’s a month behind, but Destiny 2 finally comes out on PC this week. And if you want to know which settings will affect your FPS the most, here’s a handy primer.
The exact FPS impact will vary on your rig, but NVIDIA has gone through every single setting in the Destiny 2 video options and benchmarked their individual impact.
Some settings have little to no effect on FPS, like the character detail distance. Or foliage shadows. Or texture quality, interestingly enough:
Image: NVIDIA
(For what it’s worth, NVIDIA notes that low spec machines might see a bonus between the low and lowest settings. They didn’t quote anything specific to demonstrate that, though.)
On the other side of the scale, if you want to save as much FPS as possible, don’t increase your field of view. Unsurprisingly, drawing more detail on the screen takes chunks out of your frame rate:
Image: NVIDIA
It’s worth noting that what’s on screen at any given time will have an impact on your frame rate too, so if there’s an extra explosion or two in the background, you can expect the gap between 105o and 55o to be much greater.
Another major hitter on frame rate is also the foliage – not the grass, but the foliage detail distance setting. Even on an overclocked i7-6700K – no slow slouch in gaming – there was almost a 10 FPS difference between the high and low foliage detail distance. That was about the same for the difference between the 3D setting for screen space ambient occlusion, and having it disabled entirely, while the “HDAO” setting only had a minimal impact.
And as always, shadow quality can have a big hit to FPS. The difference between the lowest and medium shadow quality settings is basically bugger all, but on NVIDIA’s rig the difference between lowest and highest was over 12 FPS, and just under 8 FPS between medium and highest.
So if you’re looking to save some FPS today while playing Destiny 2 on PC, those are the settings you should target first. If you’re playing on a potato, you can also turn the internal render resolution to 25%, although you might not like the end result:
Image: NVIDIA
Not so handy for Crucible matches, but if you want to grind through the story on a low-end laptop, it might help. You can go through the rest of NVIDIA’s guide to the Destiny 2 PC settings here.